This is not a complaint, it is me anxiously waiting for a new device in a way that I haven’t for years. You see, I have been without a PC for about 6 weeks. Until then I had my work-owned Surface Book. I never used it for personal things, but then I was too busy to do much anyway. An iPad Pro, or the occasional use of a shared PC, handled my personal needs.

I’m writing this on my wife’s HP Envy all-in-1. It’s very nice, but I wouldn’t dare sign it up for Windows Insider builds. Down in my office I have her previous all-in-1, but it is super flakey and almost unusable. A person-week of trying to fix it got me back to “super flakey and almost unusable”, so it is abandoned. I need something I can make mine. I can take Windows Insider builds. I can set it up as a developer workstation. I can use WSL and get a nice Ubuntu Linux environment running. I can play with all the other neat stuff Microsoft has done in the last few years.

My most pressing need was for a new notebook. I’ve always been a fan of the Surface Pro, so that was the default choice. Then Microsoft introduced the Surface Laptop. I still plan to carry a tablet with me, so didn’t need the tablet aspect of the Pro to the extent of the old days, when I carried just one device with me. If you don’t care about having a tablet, then why not benefit from having the better keyboard? The lapability of the Surface Laptop is much better than the Pro, so that was attractive. I started to lean towards that. Or a Dell XPS 13. My wife has a 3 year old XPS 13 and it is a wonderful thin and light notebook. It is by far the notebook she has been the most satisfied with over the years. The new ones seem even better. Concerns about the quality of Surface devices kept the Dell in contention.

I knew another Surface-related announcement was coming, but wondered if I could really hold off. Fortunately I did, because the Surface Book 2 solved another dilemma for me. Should I buy a notebook and a desktop? I really didn’t want another desktop as the Cloud has taken over many of the needs for one. But I still wanted one high-powered PC. The Surface Book 2 tips the balance. Add a Surface Dock when I’m in my office and I’ll never know I don’t have a desktop. How can I say that since I don’t have the Surface Book 2 yet? Remember I spent a couple of years living with a Surface Book (and the AWS Cloud of course) as my only work PC.

So hopefully the Surface Book 2 will arrive tomorrow as scheduled. Alexa will let me know the moment it hits the UPS Store, and I’ll be in my car 5 minutes later!